27 December 2013

Readers with long memories may recall in the dim and distant past that at one time "Get the Facts" was a favourite war-cry of Microsoft when attacking GNU/Linux and free software. Of course the "facts" were anything but, and I spent quite some time debunking them. Significantly, once the claims had been debunked often enough, and by enough people, the campaign went away, and was never heard of again.

Rather interestingly, the European Commission now seems intent on recapitulating that saga and its fate. I've noticed several times recently it has invoked the "facts", and I've tried to show why its idea of facts leaves much to be desired. So far, most of my columns about TAFTA/TTIP have been over on Computerworld UK, under the rubric "TTIP Update." There also a fair few on Techdirt. Here I'd like to address a rather interesting addition to the "Get the Facts" collection that doesn't really sit well in either publication, since it's in German.

It comes in response to an epetition from campact.de, that is currently storming away (at the time of writing it has nearly 300,000 signatures.) Evidently worried by that momentum, the European Commission has issued another of its point-by-point commentaries. I will repay the compliment by rebutting its rebuttals. I'll use the original German, but you can use a Google Translate version if you wish.

Well, it's true that a trade agreement can't change laws directly. But it can have a chilling effect, as occurred in Canada. When NAFTA was brought in, practically every proposed law to protect the environment was dropped when threats were received from US companies that they would use investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), available under NAFTA, to sue the Canadian government. That's a real hollowing out of laws not just in the future, but also in the present, since governments will be unwilling to run the risk of getting sued if they apply them rigorously.

The Commission also claims that ISDS is particularly important for investment; but here's what its own site says on the subject:

Total US investment in the EU is three times higher than in all of Asia.

EU investment in the US is around eight times the amount of EU investment in India and China together.

EU and US investments are the real driver of the transatlantic
relationship, contributing to growth and jobs on both sidesof the
Atlantic. It is estimated that a third of the trade across the Atlantic
actually consists of intra-company transfers.

Again, that misses the point, probably wilfully. This is not about formally forcing these privatisations: but that will be the effect of ISDS, since governments will find themselves sued for billions of Euros if they don't allow commons to be privatised, since that would reduce expectations of future profits - a big no-no under ISDS.

Even if that's true - and since the negotiations are completely secret, we have no way of telling until it's too late - it's already become clear how cholorinated chickens and GMOs will be brought to Europe: the institution of a transatlantic Regulatory Council. As I've already discussed at length elsewhere, this body will not only be able to veto new regulations unless they favour transatlantic trade, but they will be able to suggest to both EU and US lawmakers *directly* what new laws should be brought in - for example, those mandating that EU supermarkets must accept chickens washed in chlorine, or beef pumped up with growth hormones.

Well, the protection of intellectual monopolies may be efficient, but that didn't stop the US and EU trying to ram through ACTA, did it? So what's to stop that now? Claims that TAFTA/TTIP won't be ACTA through the backdoor ring a little hollow thanks to a recent leak that reveals what one of the EU's chief negotiators has to say on the subject of a "Christmas list of items" that lobbyists want in this area:

According to the negotiator, the most repeated request on the Christmas list was in "enforcement". Concerning this, companies had made requests to "improve and formalize" as well as for the authorities to "make statements". The Commission negotiator said that although joint 'enforcement statements' do not constitute "classical trade agreement language" -- a euphemism for things that do not belong in trade agreements -- the Commission still looks forward to "working in this area".

So let's look at those claims. It may well be that the Member States are kept informed - since they never pass on anything to their electorate, that hardly helps the public, say, who remain in the dark. The European Parliament as a whole certainly isn't kept informed, even if one or two selected individuals are given information under embargo that they also cannot pass on. And that "last word" that the European Parliament has over TTIP is all or nothing: as with ACTA, either it accepts the whole package, or it rejects the whole package. That means it will be unable to remove the bad bits and keep the good bits. By using emotional blackmail about the good bits, the European Commission will doubtless try to force through things like ISDS even though the European Parliament is increasingly alarmed about its dangers.

Well, the aim may be the same, but the results are very different. Here in Europe, we have the Precautionary Principle: that's not only absent in the US, but US industries have said many times that one of their *demands* for TAFTA/TTIP is that the Precautionary Principle should be dismantled. Similarly, here in Europe we have the very strict REACH - Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals. Again, US industries haves aid they want to get rid of this "barrier" to their profits.

Equally, nobody would suggest that social, employment or environmental standards in the US are anywhere near as stringent as those in the EU: the idea that they are somehow "equivalent" is ridiculous, and shows that the true intent of the European Commission is to water down EU standards to US levels.

And the idea that every household would somehow magically receive 500 euros, as if from some TAFTA/TTIP Father Christmas, is just dishonest: even if this impossibly ambitiously deregulation were achieved, most of the GDP boost would go to the giant international companies, which would then doubtless offshore their profits, so you can forget about any "trickle-down" effect either.

Meanwhile, to pay for those boosted bottom lines, and billions in bonuses for corporate fat-cats, ordinary people would find their jobs disappearing overseas, their food quality lowered, and broader environmental degradation caused by widespread fracking and extractive industries indifferent to the damage they cause. If anyone needs to get the facts, it's the European Commission.

24 November 2013

In my post yesterday about Cisco making the code for its H264 codec
available, I noted that the really important news was that Mozilla was
working on Daala, a fully open next generation codec. One of the key
people on the team doing that is Monty Montgomery, and he's written a
really interesting blog post
about the announcement and its background, which I recommend thoroughly
(the discussion in the comments is also very illuminating):

You know that open source has won when everybody wants to wrap
themselves in a little bit of openness in order to enjoy the glow.
That's good news - provided it represents a move to true open source and
not fauxpen source. Which brings me to the following news:

Revelations about the staggering levels of online surveillance that
are now routine in this country have been met with a stunning silence
from the UK government. There's an important meeting
tomorrow where three MPs from the main parties are trying to get some
kind of debate going on this crucial issue. It would be helpful if you
could ask your MP to participate. Here's what I've written:

I first wrote about the importance of open clinical trials two years ago. More recently, I urged people to contact their MEPs for a crucial vote that was taking place in one of the committees
in the European Parliament. The AllTrials site, which is coordinating
the fight to obtain access to this vital public health information, now
asks for help during another stage in the battle for open data:

Software patents have figured quite frequently on this blog, usually
in terms of their deep problems, especially for free software. Although
I've tended to write about what's happening in Europe and the US, the
rest of the world is also beginning to experience the same issues as
computers enter ever-more deeply into daily life there, and is similarly
seeking to come up with solutions.

My last two posts about the Linux Foundation have been about how it
is broadening its scope to embrace open projects well beyond the Linux
kernel. For example, there was the OpenDaylight Project, and then the OpenBEL. Now we have this:

As I noted in my last TTIP update,
things are beginning to get moving again on this front. One reflection
of the growing interesting in this important trade and investment
agreement was the public discussion
entitled "Internet, Trade and Democracy: Transatlantic Relations under
the Shadow of Surveillance", held in Berlin, and organised by Internet
& Society Collaboratory and the blogger project FutureChallenges.org
of the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

A couple of week ago, I discussed the awful idea of adding DRM to the official HTML5 standard, and where that would lead us. More recently, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a piece about openness that included the following comment:

It's been fairly quiet on the TAFTA/TTIP
front recently. That's largely because Europe shuts down for its summer
hols during August, and has only just got going again. Unfortunately
(for TAFTA/TTIP), the next round of negotiations has just been cancelled
because the US administration was busy being, er, not busy. But as a
consolation prize, we have a couple of documents from the European
Commission on the subject of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS),
which by a happy coincidence was the subject of my previous TTIP Update.

A couple of months ago, we reported on some interesting research into the reality
of US trade agreements, in contrast to the rosy pictures always painted
when they are being sold to the public by politicians. In particular,
it turned out that far from boosting US exports and creating more jobs,
both the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and KORUS, the free
trade agreement with South Korea, actually did the opposite --
increasing the US trade deficit with those countries, and destroying
hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

One of the ironies of European outrage over the global surveillance
conducted by the NSA and GCHQ is that in the EU, communications metadata
must be kept by law anyway, although not many people there realize it.
That's a consequence of the Data Retention Directive, passed in 2006, which:

Techdirt has been reporting for a while the efforts of the Russian government to bring the Internet there under control.
It now seems that it is taking a new approach: as well as banning or
criminalizing activities it doesn't like, it wants to compete with them
directly. Specifically, it plans to fund a new Russian search engine,
called "Sputnik", named after the first artificial satellite, put into space by the Russians in 1957. According to an article in the news magazine "Der Spiegel" (original in German), this is designed to address two problems at once.

A few months back, we wrote about the University of California's plan to lock up
even more knowledge in the form of patents, in the hope that this would
bring in lots of cash. But as Techdirt has reported time and again
over the years, patenting research does not bring in more money to fund further research, in fact it probably doesn't bring in any money
at all, once you allow for the costs of running tech transfer offices.
Moreover, there's evidence that making the results of research freely
available is much better for the wider economy than trying to turn them into intellectual monopolies.

Back in April, we noted that the Canadian government has been trying to muzzle various groups in the country, including librarians and scientists. It now seems that some scientists have had enough, as the Guardian reports:

We've noted before attempts to inflate the importance of copyright,
patents and trademarks by including a bunch of other sectors that are
only tangentially related to them when it comes to totting up their
economic impact. For example, last year Mike wrote about a joint
Department of Commerce/US Patent and Trademark Office "study" that
included 2.5 million grocery store jobs in its definition of "IP-intensive" industries.

Last week we wrote about China's worrying new censorship
approach, which threatens up to three years in prison for those
spreading "false information" if their posts are viewed 5000 times, or
forwarded 500 times. Improbable though that law is in its exactitude, it seems it has already been applied:

A month ago, we wrote about Kim Dotcom's plans to form his own political party
in New Zealand. But that's not the only way that Dotcom is going on
the attack against the system. Here's Vikram Kumar, the Chief Executive
of Dotcom's "privacy company" Mega, on another bold move:

The Internet may be a series of tubes, but those tubes have to be joined
together. That takes place at Internet exchanges (IXs), where
different ISPs can pass on and receive data. One of the largest and
most important such IXs is AMS-IX, which is based in the capital of the
Netherlands, Amsterdam. Techdirt reader Dirk Poot points out that AMS-IX has just made the following move:

One of the unfortunate consequences of the revelations about NSA spying
on just about everyone is that it creates a false impression that such
activities are really quite normal these days, and nothing much to worry
about. This probably encourages nations that don't carry out such
comprehensive snooping on their populations to think about doing so. In
Nigeria, for example, a proposal is making its way through the
legislative process that would grant the Nigerian government wide-ranging surveillance powers, as reported here by Premium Times:

In the recent demonstrations in Istanbul, the Turkish government may
have had superior police and security forces on the streets, but one
area where it lost the battle was on social networks, which
anti-government protesters used adroitly to get their viewpoint out to
the world. It seems the Turkish government has learned its lesson, and has decided to fight back according to this report in the Wall Street Journal:

It was expected
that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, would raise the issue of
NSA spying when she addressed the opening session of the UN General
Assembly in New York this week. But few would have predicted that her speech would be quite so excoriating (pdf), especially since it was given in the presence of President Obama, who spoke immediately after her.

As Techdirt has been pointingout for years,
newspaper paywalls make no sense. By stopping people from reading your
stories unless they have a subscription, you diminish your influence in
the media world, drastically reduce the number of readers and thus make
it much harder to generate revenue from them. Paywalls are also a gift to your competitors, as this story in the Guardian indicates:

As I noted a couple of years ago, one of the most important legacies
of the Hargreaves review of copyright in the digital age was its
insistence that policy must be based on evidence,
not dogma. There were some heartening signs that the UK government was
indeed following through on that, notably in terms of a series of reports
from Ofcom that explore in detail many aspects of the online use of
copyright materials - something that was simply unavailable before.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote abut a shameful move by the BBC to support adding DRM to HTML to control the playback of video content. This scheme has now moved on, and the news is astonishingly bad:

Earlier this week I posted Richard Stallman's recollections of the AI Lab at MIT, where
he first encountered and came to love the hacker world and its spirit.
That idyllic period came to an end as a result of the commercialisation
of the AI Labs' computer system, called the Lisp Machine, which led to
the destruction of the unique environment that created it in the first
place, and to its re-birth as the GNU project.

Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating
its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what
Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up
with the idea for GNU. What follows is part of a long interview I conducted with him in 1999, when I was carrying out research for "Rebel Code". Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.

At the beginning of this year, I discussed a report
written for the European Parliament, which warned that the US legal
framework allowed the authorities there to spy on EU data held by any US
cloud computing service. I also noted as an interesting fact that the NSA was building a huge new data centre, and that encryption might not offer the protection we thought.

When the first Android smartphones came out, the consensus view among
certain "experts" was that Google didn't stand chance. The dogma was
that the iPhone was so perfect, and its hold on the market so strong,
that there was no way that Android could displace it. I think we can
say that hasn't proved to be the case:

Last week, I wrote an article pointing out that the NSA's
assault on cryptography, bad as it was, had a silver lining for open
source, which was less vulnerable to being subverted than closed-source
applications produced by companies. However, that raises the question:
what about the mobile world?

One of the many valuable things that come out of the Linux Foundation
is an annual review of Linux kernel development. It's just released
the 2013 edition (freely available upon registration), and the news is resoundingly good. Here are the key points.

Remember the Digital Economy Act? Surely one of the worst pieces of
UK legislation passed - or rather, rammed through - in recent years, as
readers may recall. This was inspired (if that's the right word) by the
French Hadopi scheme brought in by Nicolas Sarkozy, whereby people were
threatened with being disconnected from the Internet if they were
accused of unauthorised sharing of digital files.

A couple of weeks ago, Mike reported on the extraordinary turn of events
involving Edward Snowden's email supplier, Lavabit. The company's
owner, Ladar Levison, preferred to shut down the service rather than
hand over to the US government something that it wanted really badly --
exactly what, we don't know because of a gag order. We then learned that the mere act of shutting Lavabit down threatened to land Levison in big trouble anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry
that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and
that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent
high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent
revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage
at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been
the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the
US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)

Last week we reported on the suspension
of Hadopi's one and only suspension, as France moved away from using
Internet disconnection as a punishment. That manifest failure of the
scheme that pioneered the three strikes approach makes a new paper from
the Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin, called "Evaluating graduated response",
particularly timely. As its title suggests, this is a review of the
three strikes approach in the light of the experiences in the five
countries that have adopted it: France, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea
and the UK -- even though the latter has still not put it into
practice.

One of the key issues in the debate surrounding Snowden's leaks is whether they might be threatening
our security by letting the bad people know what the NSA and GCHQ are
up to. Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of the UK's foreign
intelligence agency, MI6, doesn't think so:

In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA's activities, most
commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the
enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of
the public understanding of technology at the UK's Open University,
tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?

Back in June we wrote about Hadopi's first and only successful disconnection
case. As we also noted then, in the wake of its abject failure, Hadopi
was being dramatically curtailed. In particular, disconnection is no
longer available as a punishment for those alleged to have downloaded
files without authorization.

Now that Sarkozy has been thrown out of office, France is no longer
producing the steady stream of bad proposals for the Internet that it
once generated. That has left an opening for some other country to take
its place, and it seems that Russia is keen to pick up where Sarkozy
left off. We've been reporting on previous worrying developments there, and TorrentFreak has news on another one:

It would be something of an understatement to say that encryption
is a hot topic at the moment. But leaving aside deeper issues like the
extent to which the Internet's cryptographic systems are compromised,
there is a more general question about whether Web sites should be
pushing users to connect using HTTPS in the hope that this might improve
their security. That might seem a no-brainer, but for the Wikimedia
Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs Wikipedia and related
projects, it's a more complex issue.

As more and more information about the NSA's global surveillance
capabilities emerges through leaks of material obtained by Edward
Snowden, the US authorities have been playing the terrorist card
heavily. That is, they concede that they have been spying on pretty
much everyone, but claim that it was only to fight terrorism, and thus
to save lives. In particular, the NSA insists it is not spying on anyone for the purposes of industrial espionage -- here's what it wrote in an email to the Washington Post on the subject just a couple of weeks ago:

We've been reporting for several years about the extraordinary levels of secrecy
surrounding the TPP negotiations, where little information was released
about what was going on, and there were few opportunities for
representatives of civic and other groups to meet with negotiators to
present their point of view. More recently, there have been some
indications that this lack of transparency is fuelling increasing discontent among some of the participating nations.

A couple of years ago, Techdirt carried an article by Andy Kessler
about the difference between entrepreneurs who create value, and those
who lock it up. The former tend to drive prices down constantly,
innovating all the while in order to make a profit; the latter, by
contrast, typically enjoy monopolies that allow them to push up prices without offering anything more in return.

As many have already observed, the detention of David Miranda comes across as an act of blatant intimidation, as does the farcical destruction
of the Guardian's hard drives. But something doesn't ring true about
these episodes: spooks may be cynical and ruthless, but they are not
generally clueless idiots.

As long-suffering readers of this column will know, I've been
following for a while the winding road leading to the European
Commission's proposals regarding net neutrality in Europe. Along the
way, there have been many twists and turns, with hints of first one
direction, then another. But today, the Commission has finally released
its plans - not just for this area, but for the whole telecoms market in Europe:

Revelations from documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that GCHQ essentially downloads the entire Internet as it enters and leaves the UK, and stores big chunks of it, was bad enough. But last week we learned that the NSA has intentionally weakened just about every aspect of online encryption:

One of the recurrent themes on this blog has been the UK government's
use - or failure to use - open source and open data. To be fair, on
the open data side, things are going pretty well. Open source was
previously conspicuous by its absence, and that is finally changing,
albeit rather slower than many of us would wish.

When Stephen Elop moved from Microsoft to run Nokia, many saw this as
part of a cunning plan to prepare the latter for purchase by the
former. There's no real evidence for that, although soon after joining,
Nokia did place the Windows Phone platform at the heart of its future
strategy, despite the many drawbacks of doing so, effectively betting
the company on the success of Windows as the third mobile platform
alongside Android and Apple.

As I've pointed out many times in previous posts, one of the key
benefits of mandating network neutrality is that it promotes innovation
by creating a level playing field. Such statements are all very well,
but where's the evidence? An important new study entitled "The
innovation-enhancing effects of network neutrality" [.pdf], commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs from the independent SEO Economic Research unit provides perhaps the best survey and analysis of why indeed network neutrality is so beneficial:

Back in April, I wrote
about in interesting new venture from the Linux Foundation called the
OpenDaylight Project. As I pointed out then, what made this significant
was that it showed how the Linux Foundation was beginning to move
beyond its historical origins of supporting the Linux ecosystem, towards
the broader application of the important lessons it has learnt about
open source collaboration in the process. Following that step, we now
have this:

Last year, I wrote
about some serious issues with Microsoft's Secure Boot Technology in
Windows 8. It seems that the German government has started to wake up
to problems with Windows 8, as this headline in Die Zeit attests:

If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you'll have noticed that I've been tweeting rather extensively about the NSA's spying, the most recent attacks on Glenn Greenwald and now the Guardian. If you were still wondering what any of this has to do with open source, this latest news might clarify things a little:

As even a cursory glance at articles on Open Enterprise over the last
few years will indicate, open source is a massive success in
practically every market. Except, unfortunately, on the desktop
(famously) and more, generally, for consumers. And as Aral Balkan
points out in an important post from a few weeks ago, that's a real problem:

As I noted in my first TTIP Update
about the current negotiations between the EU and US over a massive
trade agreement that is far from being only about trade, it is probably
true that it will not include many of the more outrageous ideas found in
ACTA last year. But that is not to say that TTIP does not threaten many key aspects of the Internet - just that the attack is much more subtle.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the incredible spectacle of the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) attacking Mozilla
on the grounds that the latter had "lost its values" because it
insisted on defending the users' rights to control how cookies were used
on their systems.

Back in the mists of time - I'm talking about 2000 here - when free
software was still viewed by many as a rather exotic idea, I published a
book
detailing its history up to that point. Naturally, I wrote about
Apache (the Web server, not the foundation) there, since even in those
early days it was already the sectoral leader. As I pointed out:

One of the long-running jokes in the free software world is that this
year will finally be the year of open source on the desktop - just like
it was last year, and the year before that. Thanks to the astounding
rise of Android, people now realise that the desktop is last decade's
platform, and that mobile - smartphones and tablets - are the future.
But I'd argue that there is something even more important these, and
that is the widespread deployment of open source in China.

27 October 2013

Against a background of the leaks about NSA spying, transparency
-- or lack of it -- is a hot topic at the moment. But there are
situations where it can be even more important than just a matter of
enhancing confidence in government actions and acting as a check on
them, as this Wired story about Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) makes clear:

As Techdirt has reported, the attempts to extradite Kim Dotcom from New
Zealand to the US have turned into one of the most catastrophically
bungled legal cases in a long while. One of the biggest scandals to
emerge was that New Zealand citizens had been wiretapped
in an effort to gain evidence against Dotcom, since domestic spying was
forbidden there just as it is in the US (oh, wait...). Unfortunately,
rather than rapping knuckles and telling the local spooks not to do it
again, the New Zealand government has instead just brought in new legislation to make it legal in the future.

As more and more countries start introducing Web blocks, some people
console themselves with the "at least there's always Tor" argument.
Politicians may be slow, but they are not all completely stupid, and
they are beginning to get the message that Tor and other anonymous
services potentially render their Web blocks moot. It's then not a huge
leap for them to move on to the next stage -- banning or blocking Tor
-- as Russia now seems to be contemplating, according to this article on Russia Today:

Over the years Techdirt has run a number of stories
that make it abundantly clear that you don't own those ebooks you paid
for. But in case you were still clinging to some faint hope to the
contrary, here's a cautionary tale from Jim O'Donnell, a classics professor at Georgetown University.
He is currently attending the IFLA World Library and Information
Congress in Singapore, and naturally wanted to bring along some serious
reading material; ebooks on an iPad seemed the perfect way to do that.
As O'Donnell explains:

When Techdirt wrote recently about yet another secure email provider opting to close down
its service rather than acquiesce in some future US government demand
to spy on its users, we noted that Cryptocloud has promised something
similar for a while -- what it terms "corporate seppuku":

Two years ago, Techdirt reported on a very troubling ruling
in the UK courts that BT had to block access to the Usenet service
provider Newzbin2. At the time, many feared that this would be the thin
end of the wedge, giving copyright companies an easy way to shut down
other sites. And with that power, of course, would come the inevitable
errors, blocking completely unrelated sites. Just how seriously those
mistakes could be is shown by this recent case of massive overblocking, reported here on PC Pro:

Techdirt has published a number of posts that explore the issue of whether art organizations
can stop people sharing images of works in their collections when the
latter are indisputably in the public domain. Even if museums might be
able to claim copyright in their "official" photographic images, the
more important question is whether they ought to. The good news is that
some institutions are beginning to realize that using copyright
monopolies in this way contradicts their basic reason for existing -- to
share the joy of art. Here, for example, is a wonderful statement of
that principle from the Getty Museum entitled "Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come":

Prefixing concepts with the epithet "open" has become something of a
fashion over the last decade. Beginning with open source, we've had
open content, open access, open data, open science, and open government
to name but a few. Indeed, things have got to the point where
"openwashing" -- the abuse of the term in order to jump on the openness
bandwagon -- is a real problem. But a great post by David Eaves points
out that the spectrum of openness actually extends well beyond the variants typically encountered in the West:

You may remember a rather wonderful court case from 2012 that pitted
copyright lawyers against patent lawyers over the issue of whether
submitting journal articles as part of the patenting process was fair
use. Well, we now have the judge's decision, as GigaOm reports:

The use of Web blocks -- usually "for the children"
-- is becoming depressingly common these days. So much so, that many
people have probably come to accept them as a fact of online life. After
all, the logic presumably goes, we can't do much about it, and anyway
surely it's a good thing to try to filter out the bad stuff? Techdirt
readers, of course, know otherwise, but for anyone who still thinks that
well-intentioned blocking of "unsuitable" material is unproblematic,
the following cautionary tale from the British blogger W.H. Forsyth may prove instructive:

A couple of months back, Techdirt wrote about Australia's proposals to shift from the current fair dealing approach to fair use
as part of wide-ranging reform of copyright there. When something
similar was mooted in the UK as part of what became the Hargreaves
Review, it was shouted down by the copyright maximalists on the grounds
that it would lead to widespread litigation.
As Mike pointed out at the time, that's nonsense: the existence of a
large body of US case law dealing with this area makes it much easier to
bring in fair use without the need for its contours to be defined in
the courts.

Techdirt has noted the increasing demonization of hackers (not to be
confused with crackers that break into systems for criminal purposes),
for example by trying to add an extra layer of punishment on other
crimes if they were done "on a computer." High-profile victims of this
approach include Bradley Manning, Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown and of course Edward Snowden.

One of the central problems of laws that deal with copyright is that
they are essentially products of a time when the distinction between
creator and audience was clear-cut. The move to digital and the rise of
the Internet has changed all that, allowing hundreds of millions of
people to become new kinds of creators. They may not write entire
symphonies or paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but what they
lack in scale and intensity they make up for in frequency and
spontaneity.

Around the world, we have been watching the gradual taming
of social media, especially in countries where governments keep
mainstream media on a tight leash. But even against that background,
this news from the Bangkok Post about Vietnam's latest moves to censor online content is pretty extraordinary:

Last week we wrote about how the Russian equivalent of SOPA had been amended in order to ban swearing
online. Although that was worth noting for its entertainment value,
probably more important is the fact that the same law -- originally
brought in to take down sites about drugs, suicide and child pornography
-- has also been widened to include copyright infringement, as TechWeekEurope reports:

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.